In today's rapidly advancing semiconductor manufacturing industry, device features continue to shrink and levels of integration continue to increase. Increasingly larger substrates are being used for semiconductor manufacturing. Hundreds or even thousands of individual integrated circuits, i.e. “chips”, are formed on these substrates and as the substrate sizes and integration levels continue to increase, more and more semiconductor integrated circuits are being formed on each substrate. In order to accommodate the fabrication of increasingly smaller features on substrates of increasingly larger sizes, the uniformity of film thickness for a film deposited on a substrate, is required to be very high. In other words, the tolerances for film thickness uniformity across a substrate are necessarily very tight and it more challenging and more important to achieve good thickness uniformity across substrates as substrates become larger.
It is also desirable to reduce contamination during or after film deposition.